Germany’s Foreign Minister, a Man in the Middle

BERLIN — When Frank-Walter Steinmeier became Germany’s foreign minister for the second time almost a year ago, he was looking for Berlin to assume an expanded international role, commensurate with its economic clout and stability.

He hoped to engineer a German version of the Obama administration’s “reset” with Russia. Steeped in his left-leaning party’s tradition of détente with Moscow, he had great experience with the neighbor to the east.

Then President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia came with a reset of his own — a dramatic break with the post-1945 order in Europe — when he sent troops to annex Crimea and stirred political and military upheaval in eastern Ukraine.

A day after Mr. Steinmeier met with Mr. Putin in Moscow, it was clear Wednesday that the foreign minister is very much a man in the middle, embodying the continued tension in Germany over how aggressively to assert itself on the world stage and how forcefully to confront Mr. Putin over Russia’s machinations in Ukraine.

“We are still in a situation, unfortunately, where we’re far from a sustainable de-escalation of the conflict, and further still from a political solution,” Mr. Steinmeier said in Berlin on Wednesday. He added that Berlin and Moscow had a “substantially different view of events in Ukraine.”

Mr. Steinmeier is also navigating the complexities of a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose rightist party shares power with his Social Democrats. Ms. Merkel has taken an increasingly hard line with Mr. Putin, castigating Russia for its actions in Ukraine and issuing a notably blunt warning on Monday, after a Group of 20 meeting in Australia, that the Ukraine crisis could spread.

Mr. Steinmeier has emphasized engagement with the Kremlin, which the Germans call Ostpolitik, in keeping with the traditions of his party.

To supporters, particularly Social Democrats, his dogged diplomacy is laudable. Ukraine could, as Mr. Steinmeier warned again last weekend, prompt a new division of Europe, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Detractors argue that Mr. Putin has already divided Europe, making action more imperative than talk. After Mr. Steinmeier’s meetings on Tuesday with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Mr. Putin apparently yielded no progress, his approach was mocked by a conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as the diplomacy of just opening doors.

Mr. Steinmeier, a white-haired, bespectacled lawyer, is no stranger to controversy, or to foreign affairs. He took office when relations between Germany and the United States were at a low, after revelations of American electronic snooping on Germans, Ms. Merkel’s cellphone in particular. Now he scores highly with American officials. At a recent dinner, the United States ambassador in Berlin, John B. Emerson, lauded “Germany’s extraordinary foreign minister.”

The energetic Mr. Steinmeier, 58, has even occasionally outranked the popular Ms. Merkel, 60, who defeated him in the 2009 national elections, in opinion polls.

Unusual in a secular Europe, Mr. Steinmeier also draws on his Protestant faith. “As a Christian, I am responsible for my actions, but also for what I do not do,” he told a Protestant journal, Chrismon, last month. Martin Luther “had a clear message: Get involved!”

In an interview in his office in Parliament, Mr. Steinmeier expanded on his current dealings with Moscow, and his worldview.

“We must bid farewell to the illusions that the bipolar world would be replaced by multipolar,” he said. “The world is recognizably in search of a new order, without having one. And from that, conflicts arise which are harder to solve today than 10 or 20 years ago.”

In Russia, “we have no possibility to affect the domestic development,” he said. “We feel our way forward, more in day-to-day business, trying to avoid military escalation.”

“One cannot get discouraged,” he said.

For many Germans, Russia looms large in a way unthinkable in the United States, or even in Britain or France. Particularly for Mr. Steinmeier’s generation of Social Democrats molded by Chancellor Willy Brandt, Russia was not just the Cold War enemy. It helped defeat the Nazis, and has variously been foe, friend and partner in trade for centuries.

Mr. Steinmeier first gained prominence as a right-hand man to Gerhard Schröder, running Mr. Schröder’s chancellery from 1999 to 2005. Their ways parted when Mr. Schröder, controversially, went to work for the Russian gas giant Gazprom, while Mr. Steinmeier served as foreign minister from 2005 to 2009.

Aides say that Ms. Merkel and Mr. Steinmeier often call and send text messages to each other. Their work has highlighted Germany’s growing role, a responsibility that Mr. Steinmeier feels keenly.

“This is not a responsibility for which we have to apply,” he said. “It is my conviction that we simply have it. And my core phrase is that a policy of military restraint should not lead to the misunderstanding that we conduct a policy of political constraint.”

John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany, knew Mr. Steinmeier during his years at the chancellery. “I have a very mixed view of him,” he said, adding that it stemmed in part from “the total break with America over the Iraq war.”

Now, Mr. Kornblum said, “the Russians have slapped him in the face again and again and again” over Ukraine. Yet, Mr. Kornblum argued, neither the minister nor his party had broken with Ostpolitik thinking.

Only once, in May, did the passion pour out. At a Social Democratic Party rally in Berlin where he was heckled as a “warmonger,” Mr. Steinmeier broke into a tirade against the pro-Russian protesters that drew almost 2.7 million views on YouTube.

Several colleagues said that Mr. Steinmeier doesn’t usually raise his voice, nor does he seek the public eye: Mr. Steinmeier’s wife, Elke, to whom he donated a kidney in 2010, and their 18-year-old daughter rarely appear in public with him.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to London and Washington who now runs the Munich Security Conference, said that among top German politicians, Mr. Steinmeier is “the best listener.”

That is a quality needed at home, where Mr. Steinmeier has initiated an ambitious review of foreign policy, holding meetings nationwide and drawing in more than 12,000 people who work at the ministry or abroad.

But not everyone is happy. Regula Hess, 25, an international affairs student who joined a Facebook session with Mr. Steinmeier, was disappointed that it was “just like a television interview.”

“I was really hoping that he would ask us what is needed,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Germany’s Foreign Minister, a Man in the Middle. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe